Saturday, May 22, 2004
On Reading Books Once Only
C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: HBJ, 1967), p. 17:
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An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he 'has read' them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (1903), II, 353:
Gladstone wrote in 1886 that he was reading the Iliad 'for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time, and every time richer and more glorious than before.'And he read it in the original Greek, mind you!
